This is a collective interpretive record of a graduate course in Social Work on participatory action research (PAR) offered during the winter of 2007. It is written by 14 individuals including the instructor. It was inspired by the image of a chickadee bird borrowed from Jonathan Lear's (2006) book Radical Hope. The chickadee is a powerful metaphor for aboriginal peoples of Western Canada as she thrives in the bitter winters despite her tiny frame. She does so because she is gifted with deep listening in her environment wherein lies all she needs to know. The class of 14 met in a circle, read articles, kept learning journals, argued, ate together, practised popular education techniques and presented our emerging knowledge in multi-media forms. We related our experience to recent articles in EAR and to other PAR literature. The chickadee facilitated our deep listening to writings and to our own stories. Collective power emerged from our relationships and our diversity.

As both our external world and inner worlds become more complex, we are faced with more novel challenges, hardships, and duress. Creative thinking is needed to provide fresh perspectives and solve new problems. Because creativity can be conducive to accessing and reliving traumatic memories, emotional scars may be exacerbated by creative practices before these are transformed and released. Therefore, in preparing our youth to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world, it could be helpful to cultivate in them an understanding of the creative process and its relationship to hardship, as well as tools and techniques for fostering not just creativity but self-awareness and mindfulness. This chapter is a review of theories of creativity through the lens of their capacity to account for the relationship between creativity and hardship, as well as the therapeutic effects of creativity. We also review theories and research on aspects of mindfulness attending to potential therapeutic effects of creativity. Drawing upon the creativity and mindfulness literatures, we sketch out what an introductory 'creativity and mindfulness' module might look like as part of an educational curriculum designed to address the unique challenges of the 21st Century.Liane Gabora, PhD, is a Professor in the Psychology Department at the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research focuses on the mechanisms underlying creativity, and how creative ideas-and culture more generally-evolve, using both computational modeling and empirical studies with human participants. She has almost 200 articles published in scholarly books, journals, and conference proceedings, has procured over one million dollars in research funding, supervised numerous graduate and undergraduate students, and given talks worldwide on creativity and related topics. Her research on creativity is informed by her own experiences creating literature. She has a short story published in Fiction, another forthcoming in Fiddlehead, and has a novel underway titled Quilandria that merges her scholarly and creative writing interests.Mike Unrau, MFA, is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus), Canada. He is studying creativity and social innovation, focusing on how creative mindfulness impacts collective trauma towards societal change. He is currently adjunct faculty with the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University, working in field education and simulated educational experiences, as well as social-based theatre and creativity. He has held international fellowships, given lectures and conference presentations, conducted workshops and led research projects in different parts of the world, including a presocial lab in India. These days Mike's passion is Somativity, a physical movement mindfulness approach he developed after living in a Buddhist monastery (Thailand and Canada) and cofounding a physical theatre company (Calgary, AB). He has published findings on somatic awareness as w...

We apply complex systems science to the study of social systems and show how a complex-systems-inspired theory of creativity, which is referred to as ‘honing theory’, provides insight into social innovation. We propose that creativity and social innovation are processes of self-organization that yield a lower-entropy state in worldviews, which are self-organizing webs of understanding. This allows us to offer a novel perspective on the evolution of technology, the role of creativity in cultural evolution and the manner in which creativity drives innovation in social systems, such as the economy. We also introduce creative destruction as having metaphoric relevance for a social system transition from entropy to negentropy, and offer a social innovation example addressing economic collapse and resilient reorganization. We conclude that concepts from complex systems theory, and particularly entropy, shed light on both creativity and social innovation and further our understanding of how innovation affects social systems, such as in cultural and economic change.

No abstract

No abstract